Sprawled Out in Atlanta

As with just about every Atlanta story, the story of suburban poverty is underscored by an inescapable theme: traffic. Transportation is built into the very DNA of metro Atlanta, a region that radiated from a little 1830s railway terminus, grew explosively with the introduction of the postwar interstate highway system and today is home to the world’s busiest passenger airport. But here’s the central irony of Atlanta, a place that exists thanks to transportation and whose economy is intertwined with moving people and products around the country and throughout the world: Those of us who live here are gridlocked.

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A year-long reported series from Politico Magazine, featuring innovative ideas—and how they spread—from cities across the United States at a time of unprecedented urban reinvention.

That literal lack of mobility contributes to a bigger problem: Atlanta has one of the lowest rates of economic mobility in the country. This is the place where a teetotaling pharmacist turned a nerve tonic called Coca-Cola into a global brand and where a former slave named Alonzo Herndon parlayed a barbershop into Atlanta Life, one of the biggest black-owned financial services firms in the country. But today in greater Atlanta, the odds of a poor kid making it to the top rung of the economic ladder are lower than any other major metropolitan area in the country—in part because residential segregation, which keeps metro Atlantans separated not only by race but also by class, has created widely disparate public school districts, further immobilizing the poor.

The metro Atlanta area is also divided in part because it evolved over the past century and a half through mergers of convenience, not political conviction. The region is a patchwork of little cities and a few big counties—connected first by railways and then by freeways. The land between the towns eventually filled in with highways and housing as more and more people moved here. The city of Atlanta, as the hub for all this transit, may give the region its name, but the counties still operate independently, making it hard to come up with any kind of coherent policy for the whole.

Which Cities Are Fixing Urban Sprawl?

By Margaret Slattery

Atlanta may be among America’s most spread out and disconnected cities, but as a whole the rate of suburban sprawl is slowing down across the country, after peaking in the 1990s.

In a new report out last month, the research and advocacy group Smart Growth America ranks “urbanized” areas—those the U.S. Census Bureau defines as 50,000 people or more—according to how sprawling or compact they are. The report’s authors, led by University of Utah professor Reid Ewing, based their index on four factors: residential and employment density; the mix of homes, jobs and services; the strength of activity centers and downtowns; and street accessibility. Comparing their results with 2000 data, Ewing came up with the list below, showing the 25 cities that reduced sprawl the most over the past decade.

So how did they do it? In some cases, it’s a matter of attracting residents to an existing downtown through new housing developments and expanded transit systems; that’s been the approach in Milwaukee, Ewing says, as well as in Los Angeles, once the poster child for car-driven urban sprawl. Other cities, such as Miami, have put in place so-called urban growth boundaries that concentrate building within certain areas. Ewing also points to a widespread pattern of “polycentric” development—cities encouraging the growth of smaller urban “subcenters” situated at transit stops. Think, for instance, of newer and larger downtowns emerging in Arlington and Bethesda, adjacent to Washington, D.C. (which ranks second on the list below). Today, as Ewing puts it, “Suburban communities want to have a there there.”

Atlanta may facilitate the transportation of stuff—more than a million containers and trailers moved through the metro area’s freight yards in 2011, and the headquarters of shipping giant UPS are located here—but its citizens have a hard time getting anywhere. Fortune 500 companies and global firms move here because Atlanta’s airport makes it easy to get in and out of the city; Porsche North America, for one, is building a swank new headquarters just miles from the runways. But poor residents of suburban Atlanta can only reach 17 percent of the region’s jobs, a recent study found, leaving them stranded in low-paying work and trapped in what few isolated pockets of cheaper housing they can find.

Cobb County is huge, bigger than all of New York City. It’s more than twice the size of the city of Atlanta. And just as you could live and work on the Upper East Side and rarely venture to, say, the Bronx, you can live in some parts of Cobb and never see others. The county is essentially divided by I-75, which cuts through it diagonally like a river or a mountain range. On the north and west sides of the highway are the older towns — Smyrna, Austell, Mableton, Kennesaw, Acworth, Powder Springs. More affluent residents live in an area broadly referred to as “East Cobb.” If it sounds like there’s no there there, that’s essentially true. East Cobb consists of mile after mile of manicured subdivisions, nice shopping centers and some of the region’s highest-performing schools, but no actual towns. Marietta, Cobb’s capital, is older than the cities of Atlanta and Chattanooga, founded in the 1820s as early settlers made their way into the Native American-occupied lands of north Georgia. But the area remained largely rural until World War II, when Cobb County was selected as the site of the Bell Bomber factory, which later became a Lockheed facility. In the postwar boom, Cobb grew with suburban developments that housed workers at Lockheed and commuters from downtown Atlanta. As white flight from the city continued through the 1970s, and as newcomers relocating to Atlanta for corporate jobs chose the county for its good housing values and schools, Cobb had a reputation as solidly middle-class and stubbornly homogeneous; in 1980 the county was more than 95 percent white. But as metro Atlanta grew in the 1990s, Cobb became more diverse, with newcomers that included middle-class African Americans who moved to metro Atlanta in the post-Olympics boom and as part of a reverse migration from the North and Midwest to the South. Also arriving—in Cobb as throughout metro Atlanta—was an influx of immigrants from Mexico and Central America, drawn by the rapidly growing economy. Today, Cobb is even more heterogeneous, 66 percent white, marking a drop of nearly 30 percent in a generation.

Rebecca Burns is author of three books on Atlanta history. She teaches journalism at Emory University and the University of Georgia and tweets at @RebeccaBurns. She lives in Atlanta.